The brief came from a client we'd recruited for before, so the first conversation skipped the introductions and went straight to what was going wrong.

They supply furnishing products on a project basis, and had a gap at the end of each job. Once a project was delivered, nobody was reliably going back to the customer to talk about the rest of the range.

That's a missed chance, because a customer who's just watched a project go well is about as warm as a lead gets, and the products they haven't bought yet are the obvious next conversation.

A job with two ways to get it wrong

Account executive roles like this one are trickier than they look on paper. The customer already knows the company, so push too hard and you spoil the goodwill the project has just earned. Hire someone who rings to check everyone's happy, says thanks and hangs up, and the extra products never get sold.

The person they needed could keep a customer happy and still ask for the order in the same conversation, and that mix rarely shows up on a CV.

A remote location and a short list

The location made it harder still. The role was remote enough that we knew from the start the pool would be thin, because the people who could do it were spread thinly and the good ones were usually busy in a job they liked. A decent advert can run for weeks somewhere like that and reach a handful of people who could do the work.

We advertised anyway, since an advert is still the quickest way to see who's out there. Alongside it we went through the networks we've built up and asked people we know for recommendations.

On a job like this a referral tells you things an application won't, since a CV shows where someone's worked and what they sold. It says next to nothing about how they come across to a customer. For this client that was most of what mattered. Someone who's worked alongside them can usually tell you in a sentence or two.

Luck played a part. The person who got the job came to us through one of those recommendations, with the right sales skills and the right personality for it. We couldn't have planned for her specifically, but we could ask enough people that someone like her had a decent chance of reaching us.

Why she still had a proper interview

A recommendation isn't a reason to skip the checks, and so much of this role came down to personality that a quick chat and a skim of her CV wouldn't have told us much. She went through a thorough interview, run the same way it would have been for anyone.

On a sales job built around existing customers we tend to listen for a few things. Does the candidate ask questions before suggesting anything? Can they stay friendly and still get round to the sale? How do they talk about a customer who said no?

Those answers decide whether those after-delivery conversations are still happening once the novelty of a new job has worn off.

Placed within 4 weeks

Within 4 weeks we'd placed her as the client's new account executive. She's been very effective in the role, and the last we heard she was still enjoying it. For a location we'd expected to be hard work, that was a good result.

A generalist would have found this one harder, mostly because of the interview. Two salespeople can look much the same while one is too polite to ask for the order and the other makes every customer feel chased. Telling them apart, and finding the person in between, is where most of our time on this search went.

This client had come back to us after an earlier hire, and across our business 92% of our clients return for their next one.

If your next sales hire has to look after customers and still sell to them, book a call and tell us what your customers are like. Or use the green Tell Us About Your Role button to send us the role in about a minute, and we'll come back to you within 20 minutes during UK office hours.